CODEWITHSUNDEEP
bashfirefox
user1132648
user1132648

Reputation:

Controlling Firefox through terminal

I am writing a script which involves showing the user a webpage on the basis of his requirements (which I take as inputs) and opening it in firefox. For instance, a crude version of this is :

#!/bin/bash
read -p "What do you want to search" search_term
link=$(echo "http://www.mywebsite_whatever.com/search?q="$search_term)
firefox $link

The major problem is I cannot wget/urllib this website since I don't have permission.

Now what I want to do is :

Have the user look over only certain keywords on the webpage. So for that I want to either:

  1. Open firefox with the find box (Ctrl + F) ON with the keyword in it (without changing the source code of firefox)

  2. Somehow have firefox open the website, save it as html and quit. (I can't wget) Then I can grep out keywords as desired. [Please don't start off on how this is unethical and all. I am doing this merely as an exercise]

I am working on Linux.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3689

Answers (2)

Mechanical snail
Mechanical snail

Reputation: 30647

Use Wget with the --user-agent switch so that the website thinks you're using Firefox, for example

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:12.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/12.0"

Of course, for a permanent script you should instead use --user-agent="MyScript/1.0 (http://mywebsite/)" or similar so that if it goes haywire they know who to contact.

Upvotes: 1

xiaofeng.li
xiaofeng.li

Reputation: 8587

To control a browser in your program, try Selenium. It supports Java, Python, etc.

See example source code from: http://seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.html

package org.openqa.selenium.example;

import org.openqa.selenium.By;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebElement;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.ExpectedCondition;
import org.openqa.selenium.support.ui.WebDriverWait;

public class Selenium2Example  {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
    // Create a new instance of the Firefox driver
    // Notice that the remainder of the code relies on the interface, 
    // not the implementation.
    WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver();

    // And now use this to visit Google
    driver.get("http://www.google.com");
    // Alternatively the same thing can be done like this
    // driver.navigate().to("http://www.google.com");

    // Find the text input element by its name
    WebElement element = driver.findElement(By.name("q"));

    // Enter something to search for
    element.sendKeys("Cheese!");

    // Now submit the form. WebDriver will find the form for us from the element
    element.submit();

    // Check the title of the page
    System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());

    // Google's search is rendered dynamically with JavaScript.
    // Wait for the page to load, timeout after 10 seconds
        (new WebDriverWait(driver, 10)).until(new ExpectedCondition<Boolean>() {
           public Boolean apply(WebDriver d) {
               return d.getTitle().toLowerCase().startsWith("cheese!");
           }
        });

        // Should see: "cheese! - Google Search"
        System.out.println("Page title is: " + driver.getTitle());

        //Close the browser
        driver.quit();
    }
}

Upvotes: 4

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